AI-based application helps improve surgical skills
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MILAN — A new artificial intelligence-based application helps young surgeons improve their skills by reviewing their surgical videos and comparing them with videos from expert surgeons.
“Videos are a very good way to understand our errors, see where there is room for improvement, observe the best techniques of experts and replicate them,” Supriya Sriganesh, MBBS, MS, said at the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons meeting.
The Zeiss Surgery Optimizer is an application through which surgeries are recorded on the Callisto system and uploaded to the cloud.
“When you open your desktop application, you have three tabs: your institution’s cases, featured cases from the best surgeons all over the world and then your favorites that you can select from the institution’s cases,” Sriganesh said. “AI also splits the video automatically into phases, which is extremely useful when you want to review just one portion of your surgery.”
Featured cases can be selected to be played side by side with the user’s own video to compare how stages of surgery or individual maneuvers are performed. Sriganesh showed how she was able to compare the individual stages of cataract surgery performed by herself and by her father and mentor, Sri Ganesh, MBBS, MS, DNB.
“Every single day for 1 month I reviewed and compared videos using the app. As a result, all my maneuvers improved remarkably,” she said.
She was able to reduce surgical time from an average of 12 minutes to 6.5 minutes. The continuous curvilinear capsulorrhexis stage was reduced from 40 seconds to 27 seconds, hydrodissection from 44 seconds to 9 seconds, and phacoemulsification from about 3 minutes 10 seconds to 1 minute 52 seconds.
“For a beginner surgeon or someone who is in the early years of practice, reducing your surgical time by 50% is huge, although our primary objective must be skill, not speed,” she said. Quoting Sri Ganesh, she recommended “focus on the economy of movements and surgical efficiency, and speed will follow.”
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Sriganesh S. Is there room for artificial intelligence in improving my surgical skills? Presented at: European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons meeting; Sept. 16-20, 2022; Milan.
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